The atopic march or allergic march describes the typical journey seen in atopic people, beginning with hay fever, eczema, asthma and building into life threatening and often multiple allergies.
The way I understand it, when a child is born with dry skin and eczema, often the first sign of atopy, this is the beginning of the march.
Eczema is often not treated seriously at this stage and can lead to sensitisation to allergens through the open skin. The way we treat eczema seems to be to moisturise at the first line of defence and then prescribe steroids if that doesn’t help. Typically you’ll get prescribed cheaper emollients and creams and will go through loads of different brands before you find one that doesn’t irritate the child’s skin more. There is also nothing natural or healing about these prescription moisturisers.
No one looks at what is causing the eczema. No one asks why?
I strongly believe that early interventions at these first signs of eczema would potentially identify allergies that could be treated. Some allergies such as grass, pollen and dust can be treated with immunotherapy but this is not easy to get on the NHS.
Push for allergy testing if your child has eczema and you don’t know why. Try everything else before you resort to any steroids and because of my own personal experiences, don’t go down the topical steroid route. I’d avoid immunosuppresants too if you can.
Once we are on the march we go through life reacting and trying to dampen that response with anti-histamines, emollients and steroids.
We never look for the cause and try to fix things internally.
And the body continues to react. I think of it like a bucket. When your bucket has a little bit of water in it you can carry it easily and not spill any water. As the bucket fills, or the allergens get worse and you get more allergens, your bucket quickly fills up, begins to overflow and you can no longer carry it.
The body becomes so reactive to outside triggers and allergens that you are now on this march and you can’t stop it!
I believe that you CAN and should be able to stop it and work with your body to reduce inflammation but it’s not easy.
There is no cure, no pill or sticky plaster to fix an atopic person.
But I’m finding that as I navigate through my journey with TSW I am slowly removing things from my life that I don’t think are helping and trying to promote better operation of my organs, less allergens, food that’s easier for my body to process, hydration from fruit and vegetables.
I really believe that if anyone had explored my childhood chronic eczema that the dairy allergy would have been identified. I may have been able to find a way to navigate life better and I might not have anaphylaxis to dairy now. I will never know for sure but it makes sense to me.
I decided to cut out dairy in my twenties which did indeed help my body heal and my eczema almost disappeared. However when I next consumed dairy I had anaphylaxis to it, not just eczema flare ups. Why would my body do this? How do things move from inconvenient and unpleasant to life threatening?
I also became allergic to more foods as I grew older. It began with an egg allergy, then peanuts, then other nuts, then dairy, then wheat, then soya…
You can read about The Allergic March on the World Allergy Organisation website to find out more.
And if you love the further reading, check out also The Atopic March: Critical Evidence and Clinical Relevance
More studies are needed into how we can stop this happening.
Have you experienced being on this march? Collecting new allergies along the way and not being able to stop the process?
And can we reverse this march and heal? That is the next big question…
You know Ruth, it does seem that you are onto something there with the lack of research, or more to the point, suitable, well planned double blind placebo controlled trials. I feel provoked to see if this is in fact correct. In the meantime here is a 2016 review of multiple trials :
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27280278/
Ha Ha,.. I know trials have been done but I still hear from people with babies who have eczema, which isn’t tackled early, which then (sadly and inevitably) leads to allergies. But who knows whether that would happen anyway? Who knows anything really. But I am feeling that there needs to be a more holistic and natural view to treatments. Of course I’m biased because I’m on this crazy rollercoaster and do wonder if my journey would have been different if things had been handled differently at the start.
I’d have to qualify these statements: “No one looks at what is causing the eczema. No one asks why?” and “We never look for the cause and try to fix things internally.” What you mean there is mainstream medicine doesn’t. Many, many natural health practitioners know very well to take a child off dairy straight away at the first sign of colic actually – often the pre-runner to some kind of ezcema. I was taught 30 years ago to watch out for the colic-eczema-asthma-food ‘march’. I just feel frustrated that there are so many people who DO know that as a really obvious thing to do, and yet people like yourself have not benefited from that knowledge as it has not been taken up and used in mainstream medicine. I am sorry for it. VERY frustrating! I am actually just writing a new Multiple Sensitivity Plan to try and come up with a process for people to stop the seemingly-inexorable progression, as I must get asked about it every single day. OK. Rant over, lol 😉
Oh gosh yes that’s is exactly what I mean Micki, but it seems as a nation of people looking for a pill or a cream to cure things we rush to the doctor and that’s not always the best way forward in my opinion. I do mean mainstream medicine. I know what you and other natural health practitioners are doing is the way forward. But how do we get that message out there? I’m trying to undo all the damage through herbal tinctures and changing my mindset and seeing huge progress, but at 47 it’s frustrating to look back at all the pain and wonder if I could have avoided much of it.
Aargh. I know, Ruth, I hear that same thing daily, hence my frustration. I seem to spend my life teaching/advising etc and trying to get the messages across, which is all we can do really. We have to keep at it! Functional medicine is starting to make some strides into mainstream now, what with the Dr Raj programmes and the recent switch to a proper diet for diabetics. That one drives me insane because I and others have been doing that for 3 decades and been pilloried for it! But, when I started in this field eons ago, I was thought of a kind of ‘witch’ and now I am almost mainstream, so it has shifted lol!!
Keep on witching! Nature and plants have so much to teach us. Just drinking some fresh nettle tea from my own weeds.. Full of vitamins and minerals and FREE! Takes so amazing too. Big pharma has a lot to answer for. They won’t make any money if people can heal naturally will they?